[Desktop13.04-Topic] GNOME plans review

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hey,

That's a "classic", we usually review our plans for GNOME for the next 
cycle.

That's going to be a controversial topic but I want to suggest we stay 
on stable GNOME this cycle, the reasons are (in random order):

- tracking unstable GNOME is taking lot of resources that we don't 
invest in our desktop (packaging a new stack every 3 weeks, dealing with 
transitions, regressions, etc)

- our desktop is quite less "stock GNOME" than it used to be, which 
means we have extra integration work to do and it's less trivial to do 
those "on the way" during the cycle

- GNOME unstable series and Ubuntu "working every day" are hard to 
conciliate goals

- GNOME is not communicating early enough on what is coming for us to 
discuss next cycle at UDS (see nautilus 3.6 in quantal)

- GNOME is shipping stables with transitions half done (see gstreamer 
1.0 this cycle) which is not something we want in Ubuntu

- our "feedback loop" with GNOME is not really working nowadays, they 
don't have time to look at most bugs and we hit regressions and sit on 
them until somebody on our side has time to look at them, which means 
neither GNOME or us benefits much from tracking unstable GNOME...


On the con side though:

- it gives us less opportunity to work with upstream on resolving issues

- we don't get early feedback on what is happening

- the new version of libraries might have APIs our app writers might 
want to use


Comments?

Seb